GeForce 500 series

Its direct competitor was AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series; they were launched approximately a month apart.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics card is the first in the Nvidia GeForce 500 series to use a fully enabled chip based on the refreshed Fermi architecture, with all 16 stream multiprocessors clusters and all six 64-bit memory controllers active.

On January 25, 2011, Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, to target the "sweet spot" segment where price/performance ratio is considered important.

Price-wise, the new card trod into the range occupied by the GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB) and the Radeon HD 6790.

Standard versions of this card performed comparably to the AMD Radeon HD 6870, and would eventually replace the GeForce GTX 460.

Premium versions of this card operate at higher speed (factory overclocked), and are slightly faster than the Radeon 6870, approaching the performance of basic versions of the Radeon HD 6950 and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti.

[17] Nvidia announced in April 2018 that Fermi will transition to legacy driver support status and be maintained until January 2019.